The main theme in the work of the naive artist Pavel Ustyugov was the history of his ancestors, the Ustyugov family, and their native Ural village Yasashnaya. Most of his paintings illustrate family legends about immigrants who came to the Urals from the city of Veliky Ustyug.
According to archival records of the historian Gerhard Friedrich Miller, collected during the Great Northern Expedition of 1733–1743, after the conquest of Siberia by Ermak at the end of the 16th century, people began actively settling in the new lands. Peasants from Central Russia went to develop unoccupied lands of the Urals and Siberia from the 1590s to the 1640s.
The painting ‘Immigrants to the Urals. 1644’, displayed in the exhibition, tells about the immigrants crossing the Ural Mountains. Ustyugov described the story in detail in his autobiography,
According to archival records of the historian Gerhard Friedrich Miller, collected during the Great Northern Expedition of 1733–1743, after the conquest of Siberia by Ermak at the end of the 16th century, people began actively settling in the new lands. Peasants from Central Russia went to develop unoccupied lands of the Urals and Siberia from the 1590s to the 1640s.
The painting ‘Immigrants to the Urals. 1644’, displayed in the exhibition, tells about the immigrants crossing the Ural Mountains. Ustyugov described the story in detail in his autobiography,
